Knowledge Graphs (KGs) have emerged as fundamental platforms for powering intelligent decision-making and a wide range of Artificial Intelligence (AI) services across major corporations such as Google, Walmart, and AirBnb. KGs complement Machine Learning (ML) algorithms by providing data context and semantics, thereby enabling further inference and question-answering capabilities. The integration of KGs with neuronal learning (e.g., Large Language Models (LLMs)) is currently a topic of active research, commonly named neuro-symbolic AI. Despite the numerous benefits that can be accomplished with KG-based AI, its growing ubiquity within online services may result in the loss of self-determination for citizens as a fundamental societal issue. The more we rely on these technologies, which are often centralised, the less citizens will be able to determine their own destinies. To counter this threat, AI regulation, such as the European Union (EU) AI Act, is being proposed in certain regions. The regulation sets what technologists need to do, leading to questions concerning: How can the output of AI systems be trusted? What is needed to ensure that the data fuelling and the inner workings of these artefacts are transparent? How can AI be made accountable for its decision-making? This paper conceptualises the foundational topics and research pillars to support KG-based AI for self-determination. Drawing upon this conceptual framework, challenges and opportunities for citizen self-determination are illustrated and analysed in a real-world scenario. As a result, we propose a research agenda aimed at accomplishing the recommended objectives.

The progress of event extraction research has been hindered by the absence of wide-coverage, large-scale datasets. To make event extraction systems more accessible, we build a general-purpose event detection dataset GLEN, which covers 205K event mentions with 3,465 different types, making it more than 20x larger in ontology than today's largest event dataset. GLEN is created by utilizing the DWD Overlay, which provides a mapping between Wikidata Qnodes and PropBank rolesets. This enables us to use the abundant existing annotation for PropBank as distant supervision. In addition, we also propose a new multi-stage event detection model CEDAR specifically designed to handle the large ontology size in GLEN. We show that our model exhibits superior performance compared to a range of baselines including InstructGPT. Finally, we perform error analysis and show that label noise is still the largest challenge for improving performance for this new dataset. Our dataset, code, and models are released at \url{https://github.com/ZQS1943/GLEN}.}

Law-enforcement investigations aimed at preventing attacks by violent extremists have become increasingly important for public safety. The problem is exacerbated by the massive data volumes that need to be scanned to identify complex behaviors of extremists and groups. Automated tools are required to extract information to respond queries from analysts, continually scan new information, integrate them with past events, and then alert about emerging threats. We address challenges in investigative pattern detection and develop an Investigative Pattern Detection Framework for Counterterrorism (INSPECT). The framework integrates numerous computing tools that include machine learning techniques to identify behavioral indicators and graph pattern matching techniques to detect risk profiles/groups. INSPECT also automates multiple tasks for large-scale mining of detailed forensic biographies, forming knowledge networks, and querying for behavioral indicators and radicalization trajectories. INSPECT targets human-in-the-loop mode of investigative search and has been validated and evaluated using an evolving dataset on domestic jihadism.

SALMA, the first Arabic sense-annotated corpus, consists of ~34K tokens, which are all sense-annotated. The corpus is annotated using two different sense inventories simultaneously (Modern and Ghani). SALMA novelty lies in how tokens and senses are associated. Instead of linking a token to only one intended sense, SALMA links a token to multiple senses and provides a score to each sense. A smart web-based annotation tool was developed to support scoring multiple senses against a given word. In addition to sense annotations, we also annotated the corpus using six types of named entities. The quality of our annotations was assessed using various metrics (Kappa, Linear Weighted Kappa, Quadratic Weighted Kappa, Mean Average Error, and Root Mean Square Error), which show very high inter-annotator agreement. To establish a Word Sense Disambiguation baseline using our SALMA corpus, we developed an end-to-end Word Sense Disambiguation system using Target Sense Verification. We used this system to evaluate three Target Sense Verification models available in the literature. Our best model achieved an accuracy with 84.2% using Modern and 78.7% using Ghani. The full corpus and the annotation tool are open-source and publicly available at https://sina.birzeit.edu/salma/.

The notion of preferences plays an important role in many disciplines including service robotics which is concerned with scenarios in which robots interact with humans. These interactions can be favored by robots taking human preferences into account. This raises the issue of how preferences should be represented to support such preference-aware decision making. Several formal accounts for a notion of preferences exist. However, these approaches fall short on defining the nature and structure of the options that a robot has in a given situation. In this work, we thus investigate a formal model of preferences where options are non-atomic entities that are defined by the complex situations they bring about.

Semantic text similarity plays an important role in software engineering tasks in which engineers are requested to clarify the semantics of descriptive labels (e.g., business terms, table column names) that are often consists of too short or too generic words and appears in their IT systems. We formulate this type of problem as a task of matching descriptive labels to glossary descriptions. We then propose a framework to leverage an existing semantic text similarity measurement (STS) and augment it using semantic label enrichment and set-based collective contextualization where the former is a method to retrieve sentences relevant to a given label and the latter is a method to compute similarity between two contexts each of which is derived from a set of texts (e.g., column names in the same table). We performed an experiment on two datasets derived from publicly available data sources. The result indicated that the proposed methods helped the underlying STS correctly match more descriptive labels with the descriptions.

The fast adoption of new technologies forces companies to continuously adapt their operations making it harder to predict workforce requirements. Several recent studies have attempted to predict the emergence of new roles and skills in the labour market from online job ads. This paper aims to present a novel ontology linking business transformation initiatives to occupations and an approach to automatically populating it by leveraging embeddings extracted from job ads and Wikipedia pages on business transformation and emerging technologies topics. To our knowledge, no previous research explicitly links business transformation initiatives, like the adoption of new technologies or the entry into new markets, to the roles needed. Our approach successfully matches occupations to transformation initiatives under ten different scenarios, five linked to technology adoption and five related to business. This framework presents an innovative approach to guide enterprises and educational institutions on the workforce requirements for specific business transformation initiatives.

Robots performing human-scale manipulation tasks require an extensive amount of knowledge about their surroundings in order to perform their actions competently and human-like. In this work, we investigate the use of virtual reality technology as an implementation for robot environment modeling, and present a technique for translating scene graphs into knowledge bases. To this end, we take advantage of the Universal Scene Description (USD) format which is an emerging standard for the authoring, visualization and simulation of complex environments. We investigate the conversion of USD-based environment models into Knowledge Graph (KG) representations that facilitate semantic querying and integration with additional knowledge sources.

This paper proposes a new cognitive model, acting as the main component of an AGI agent. The model is introduced in its mature intelligence state, and as an extension of previous models, DENN, and especially AKREM, by including operational models (frames/classes) and will. This model's core assumption is that cognition is about operating on accumulated knowledge, with the guidance of an appropriate will. Also, we assume that the actions, part of knowledge, are learning to be aligned with will, during the evolution phase that precedes the mature intelligence state. In addition, this model is mainly based on the duality principle in every known intelligent aspect, such as exhibiting both top-down and bottom-up model learning, generalization verse specialization, and more. Furthermore, a holistic approach is advocated for AGI designing, and cognition under constraints or efficiency is proposed, in the form of reusability and simplicity. Finally, reaching this mature state is described via a cognitive evolution from infancy to adulthood, utilizing a consolidation principle. The final product of this cognitive model is a dynamic operational memory of models and instances. Lastly, some examples and preliminary ideas for the evolution phase to reach the mature state are presented.

This paper is concerned with knowledge graph embedding with background knowledge, taking the formal perspective of logics. In knowledge graph embedding, knowledge— expressed as a set of triples of the form (a R b) (“a is R-related to b”)—is embedded into a real-valued vector space. The embedding helps exploiting geometrical regularities of the space in order to tackle typical inductive tasks of machine learning such as link prediction. Recent embedding approaches also consider incorporating background knowledge, in which the intended meanings of the symbols a, R, b are further constrained via axioms of a theory. Of particular interest are theories expressed in a formal language with a neat semantics and a good balance between expressivity and feasibility. In that case, the knowledge graph together with the background can be considered to be an ontology. This paper develops a cone-based theory for embedding in order to advance the expressivity of the ontology: it works (at least) with ontologies expressed in the description logic ALC, which comprises restricted existential and universal quantifiers, as well as concept negation and concept disjunction. In order to align the classical Tarskian Style semantics for ALC with the sub-symbolic representation of triples, we use the notion of a geometric model of an ALC ontology and show, as one of our main results, that an ALC ontology is satisfiable in the classical sense iff it is satisfiable by a geometric model based on cones. The geometric model, if treated as a partial model, can even be chosen to be faithful, i.e., to reflect all and only the knowledge captured by the ontology. We introduce the class of axis-aligned cones and show that modulo simple geometric operations any distributive logic (such as ALC) interpreted over cones employs this class of cones. Cones are also attractive from a machine learning perspective on knowledge graph embeddings since they give rise to applying conic optimization techniques.